Cognitive Labs

Scene from Surrogates (c) Touchstone Pictures | HD trailer

Like many people, you may have seen the preview for the following...here's an excerpt from Alan Boyle's cosmiclog at MSNBC

Bruce Willis' latest action movie takes place in a world where humans mostly stay behind closed doors and interact using lifelike cyber-substitutes. These robotic "surrogates" pass along all their sensations - via virtual reality. In this wired-up world, you can be anybody you want to be through your surrogate: a healthier, younger version of yourself, or a super-athlete, or a supermodel. (Will that be male or female?)

So "Surrogates" is meant as pure science fiction, right? Wrong. The filmmakers and futurists behind the movie say they're aiming for an only slightly enhanced version of present-day trends.

"In the near future, robots are going to start to look like humans," said James Canton, founder of the San Francisco-based Institute for Global Futures. "I think within 10 years you're going to have the world of the surrogates."

You don't even have to wait 10 years to experience the kind of virtual life that eventually goes so wrong in "Surrogates," said the film's director, "Terminator 3" veteran Jonathan Mostow.

"Right now on the Internet you can go and you can shop, talk with your friends, get the news. You can express your opinion. You can pretty much live a full human life without ever leaving your home," Mostow told me.

Not that the movie is a Michael Moore-ish diatribe against the Twitterpated lives that many of us lead nowadays. Like most folks in Hollywood, Mostow recognizes that the film will not fly unless it's the entertaining, thrill-a-minute action ride theatergoers expect from a Bruce Willis movie. But he also means it to be something more.

See the whole piece at MSNBC's cosmiclog

Labels: boyle, canton, future, kurzweil, mostow, willis